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Una’s fast, but a man running for his life is faster. He’s out of the freight yard in seconds, and Una knows if he slips too far out of her sight, he’ll be gone for good. She will not allow that. Capturing one of them is not enough. Capturing them both would not be enough to make up for Wil’s unwinding either, but it will come closer.
He has a gun. She’s sure of it. She hasn’t seen it but she knows that he must, for men like him always do. He could be up ahead waiting to ambush her, so her pursuit needs to be stealthy. It needs to be more of a stalk than a chase—but you can’t stalk someone who already knows you’re coming after him. Una slows herself down. Allows herself to think. Back on the Rez, Pivane taught her to hunt. She was good at it. If she sees this as a hunt, she will prevail.
The flat, soulless walls of the old industrial buildings just outside the freight yard might give Hennessey cover, but they also provide a nice blind for her. She stops near a corner, keeping in shadow against a wall, and she listens. He will be listening too. Waiting for a moment to break for freedom. So, then, what will he see as freedom?
Una thinks she knows.
One block over, the industrial zone ends at the Mississippi River, and less than a quarter mile downriver is a stone arch pedestrian bridge. It’s no longer in use, it has no overhead streetlamps. If he can get across that bridge he could disappear into downtown Minneapolis. That bridge is his freedom.
Una makes her way toward the bridge as stealthily as she can. Then, hiding in the shadow of a mailbox that probably hasn’t seen a letter in years, she waits.
Thirty seconds later he bolts from a side street, making a beeline toward that bridge. She knows she won’t be able to intercept him if she runs, but she doesn’t have to run. It might be dark, but she can see he has his gun out—an ostentatious silver thing that catches the moonlight nicely. Just as he gets on the bridge, she takes aim and fires low. He wails in pain and goes down. Now Una runs down to the bridge to see the damage. She can see him clearly in the faint footlights still speckling the bridge. The bullet got him in the left knee, rendering him virtually immobile. He fires at her, but his aim is off. She’s on him quickly enough to kick the gun from his hand. Then she backs up and raises the rifle.
Panting, spitting, Hennessey pulls himself up against the stone railing.
“This is about that SlotMonger kid, isn’t it!”
“He had a name!” growls Una, fingering the trigger, tempting herself to pull it. Just give me a reason, she said. But she has plenty of reasons already. “His name was Wil Tashi’ne. I want you to say it.”
He looks down at his shredded knee, and grimaces. “What’s the point? You’re going to kill me anyway. So do it.”
Could anything be more tempting than that invitation? “You have two choices,” she tells the man. “You could try to get away, and I’ll kill you. Or you could surrender and be brought in to face Arápache justice.”
“How about a third choice?” he says . . . and without warning Hennessey hurls himself over the railing into the river. It’s not the highest bridge. A man—even a wounded man—could easily survive the fall and escape. Una hadn’t considered this alternative, and is furious at herself, until she hears a faint thud from far below.
When she looks over the side, she sees not water, but a rocky shore. Hennessey severely misjudged and hit a boulder. Now he has all the choices of a dead man.
Una hears approaching footsteps, and sees Lev coming onto the bridge.
“What happened? I heard gunshots. Where is he?” He glances at the blood on the ground. “You didn’t!”
“I didn’t. He did.” And she draws his attention over the side of the bridge. Lev pulls out the flashlight and shines it down at the rocks, making the scene much clearer. Hennessey’s spine is broken across the back of a sharp boulder just a few feet from the water’s edge.
Lev lets off a shiver that Una can feel like a shock wave. She knows she should feel revulsion, too, but all she can feel is disappointment that she can no longer exact revenge from the man.
Together Una and Lev go down to the shoreline to confirm that Hennessey is dead. Then they bring his broken body to the water, turn him facedown, and push him off to be carried away by the current.
“At least we still have Fretwell,” says Lev. “That will be enough.”
“Enough for you to win over the Arápache people,” Una agrees, “but is it enough to get the Tribal Council to take a stand against unwinding?”
“It’ll get them to listen to me,” Lev says. “Then it’s up to me to convince them.”
In spite of the fact that they did no killing today, they both have blood on their hands from dragging Hennessey’s body to the water. They wash their hands in the river as best they can.
“C’mon, we’d better get back to Fretwell,” says Lev. “I tied him up, but we should be on our way back to the Rez with him before his tranqs wear off.”
Before they leave, Una takes one last look at the jagged boulder that claimed Hennessey’s life. How mystical, and how perfect the universe is! That boulder was shorn from a mountain by a glacier maybe a hundred thousand years ago, and then carefully deposited here with patient intent, waiting all these years to break that criminal’s spine in two. All things have a purpose. That’s something both she and Lev can take comfort in.
13 • Hayden
Hayden Upchurch watches it grow like a cancer clinging to the walls of the decaying power plant: Starkey’s lethal crusade. It’s ugly and toxic, and it won’t stop devouring all the good that’s left in these kids until there’s none left. Starkey will drag his Stork Brigade through his bloody war front until they are either dead from bullets taken in battle, or dead on the inside from the things they’ve seen and done. Hayden knows that these harvest camp attacks are pointless. The consequence of Starkey’s war on unwinding will not be the glorious vindication of AWOLs and storks, but instead their damnation.
“This is Radio Free Hayden podcasting from somewhere dark and dingy that smells of ancient grease and more recent body odor. If anyone actually hears this podcast, I must first apologize that there’s no visual of me. My bandwidth is the digital equivalent of a mule train. So instead, I’ve posted this wonderful Norman Rockwell image instead of a video. You’ll note how the poor innocent ginger kid standing on the chair with his butt hanging out is about to be tranq’d in the ass by the ‘kindly country doctor.’ I felt the image was somehow appropriate.”
Rumor is that Starkey’s benefactors will be supplying clappers for the next harvest camp attack. Will there be anyone left not terrified of kids like them once Starkey is done? Starkey wants that terror—he thrives on it. Yet how could he not realize that the many who might have once been sympathetic to the cause are now turning to the Juvenile Authority for an answer to the violence. The Juvies have an answer, all right: the blessed peace of division. The eternal rest of unwinding. That will be Mason Starkey’s legacy—an end to resistance, an end to rebellion, the absolute silencing of the last generation that could derail the hellish train civilization has boarded.
